Alanya to Alanya

by L. Timmel Duchamp

$19 10.00 (paperback)
$7.95 (e-book)	EPUB	MOBI

Read Chapter One

Seattle, February 2076. The Marq'ssan bring business as usual to a screeching halt all over the world, and Professor Kay Zeldin joins Robert Sedgewick, US Chief of Security Services, in his war against the invaders. Soon Kay is making rather than writing history. But as she goes head-to-head against the Marq'ssan, the long-buried secrets of her past resurface, and her conflicts with Sedgewick and Security Services multiply. She faces terrifying choices. Her worldview—her very grip on reality—is turned inside out. Whose side is she really on? And how far will she go in serving that side?

"The coupling of real thoughtfulness and rip-roaring excitement is as rare in science fiction as in any other genre. But here, in Alanya to Alanya, they're locked together in the most exciting—and certainly the most intelligent!—tale of alien invasion I've read in decades. Because it is believable, it's fascinating. And, in the years that have seen Margaret Thatcher go and Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice arrive, Kay Zeldin is an extraordinarily effective portrait of a political hero."
  —Samuel R. Delany, author of Dhalgren

Reviews

"The intersection of science fiction and politics has always served an important critical function, from George Orwell's dystopian 1984 and Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness to Robert Heinlein's ultra-nationalist Starship Troopers, but until now they have always served as a means of analyzing political structures. With L. Timmel Duchamp's million-word Marq'ssan novel (broken into five books), anarchy is extrapolated. This is not anarchy in its popular sense, but in its truest sense. It is also feminism at its most fundamental level, and neither can be un-twined from the other." ( read the whole review)
   —Sean Melican, Ideomancer, March 2007

"Alanya to Alanya does just what a political sf novel should do: it leavens its political message with first-rate futuristic extrapolation, chilling dystopianism and a breathless adventure story that keeps you turning the pages. It was a refreshing read and a rare example of deft political storytelling."
   —Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing, July 2006 (read the whole review)

"Not an easy or comfortable book, but one that rewards a thoughtful reader who is willing to give up simple action plots for a close consideration of political and social ideas. In fact, the closest comparison one might give is to some of Le Guin’s later work—no small recommendation. Worth looking for." (read the whole review)
   —Peter Heck, Asimov's, June 2006

"Readers who still appreciate the anger and surety of those early works can take heart at the publication of L. Timmel Duchamp's Alanya to Alanya...[T]hose with a serious interest in dystopias and particularly the feminist version thereof should find L. Timmel Duchamp's Marq'ssan Cycle a rewarding experience."
   —Michael Levy, New York Review of Science Fiction, December 2005

"Politically savvy and philosophically relevant, this title puts a human face on today's problems."
   —Library Journal, June 15, 2005

"Alanya to Alanya is an intriguing mixture of SF genres and styles: It has utopian and dystopian elements, a strong splash of the political thriller, a good mystery subplot in Kay's amnesia, a hint of the sense of discovery that imbues first-contact novels and plenty to say about the current state of the real world." (read the whole review)
   —Science Fiction Weekly, June 27, 2005

"Alanya to Alanya is SF on a broader scale, with The War of the Worlds as one inspiration, but its metaphors apply to a very human tangle of loyalty and betrayal, politics and idealism—Wells and Orwell updated for the end of the 20th century."
   —Locus, June 2005

"[Duchamp's] political world building has a level of detail and believability that rivals Bruce Sterling at his best, and her pacing is much better than most other books driven so heavily by political concepts, such as Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged or Sheri S. Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country."
  —Strange Horizons, November 30, 2005 (read the whole review)

"This is the first of a five novel series which mixes politics, aliens, and a variety of feminist and political issues which might easily have become unreadably polemic and convoluted, but which is surprisingly readable and entertaining despite its heavy load of subtext."
  —Don d'Ammassa, Chronicle, September 2005

"Alanya to Alanya is not so much an exploration of the way humanity responds to an alien presence as an illustration of how a world under siege from its own governments finally revolts; the invaders are simply the catalyst for change."
  —Seattle Times, July 3, 2005 (read the whole review)

"My 'discovery' of the work of L. Timmel Duchamp was, as usual, pure serendipity...her intellectual grounding and her political activism both contribute to create a novel that is highly readable and as politically relevant as any novel I can recall."
    —Ritch Calvin, The SFRA Review, Jan./Feb./March 2006

ISBN: 978-0-9746559-6-3 (13 digit)
Publication Date: Jun 2005
paperback 448 pages